Who Runs Your Mobile Life? You or Those Pesky Notifications?

Ping! Chirp! Boop! Whatever. Notifications and talk about notifications are all the rage and have been for some time. Now that Apple looks to have finally addressed its lousy notification system by essentially copying how Android does that, the talk about notifications has heated up again. Whenever that conversation comes up it reminds me of a discussion I frequently have with myself.

Do I really want to have notifications going off all the time or do I want to control how I access email, Apps, and other sorts of software that can give me a notification? I go back and forth with this. Admittedly there are periods of my life and work where they come in handy. There are other periods where I’ll shut them all off. I tend to side that way more often than not these days and here’s why.

Frankly, even when I have a notification turned on because I’m expecting some important communication or piece of news I find them distracting and counterproductive. I long ago moved passed the syndrome of feeling like I have to answer a phone when it rings. Of course voice mail helped me with that. But do I really need a notification that tells me I have a voice mail? For some reason I respond differently to that than I do a phone ringing.

I much prefer, in most cases, to control when I access voice mails, respond to text messages, or other types of notifications. It’s the same with email. There was a time where I notifiers that would pop up and tell me when a new email came in. But I got rid of those as well.

I know there are different strokes for different folks, and some folks enjoy the stream of notifications coming in, but increasingly I find myself not in that camp.

How about you? Do you let notifications run your life, or do you take control?